Power and Passion

Edge of Darkness Directed by Martin Campbell Runtime: 117 min.

Back onscreen in Edge of Darkness, after a seven-year absence, Mel Gibson looks like hell. He’s certainly been through it—enduring the worst public vilification since Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson. But he’s still quite a good actor and brings a believably gruff, on-edge solidity to his role as Irish Boston cop Thomas Craven, who is searching for his daughter’s killer. He’s more believable than Sean Penn’s flamboyant grieving father turn in Mystic River.Had Gibson played Jack Nicholson’s role in The Departed the film might have achieved the authenticity that was lost to Scorsese’s lowlife fantasizing. Gibson roots Craven in credible middle-aged fatigue as if to prove he’s a truer artist than his haters claim.

No longer the matinee idol of The Year of Living Dangerously,Tequila Sunrise, Hamlet and What Women Want, Gibson is now more interesting-looking than pretty. Like De Niro, he has a working-class Dad’s face: Off the booze but on his guard, this tension carries a viewer through Edge of Darkness’ machinations that go from thriller plot to political conspiracy. My favorite Gibson performance remains Conspiracy Theory (which came before the secular media mob was out to get him). Now, Edge of Darkness concedes Gibson’s justified paranoia by portraying it as Craven’s un-illusioned response to the specious motives of both a self-righteous left and corrupt authority.While attempting to defend his personal, family honor (gun in hand), Craven uncovers the duplicitous actions of both heedless dissidents and an unprincipled senator.

Gibson’s First Amendment nightmare of the past seven years is summarized in Edge of Darkness’ closing line: “He’s lost the power of speech.” But his chosen defense brief is the action-movie genre he popularized throughout the 1980s. Edge of Darkness is a return to the gruesome, paranoid violence Gibson finetuned in the Mad Max trilogy and simply advocated in the Lethal Weapon series. It should have been no surprise when Gibson used violence as an expressive element when directing The Passion of the Christ.Violence had long been Gibson’s medium, the means by which he communicated the pop audience’s own sense of futility and revenge. But The Passion of the Christ also resembled a Catholic art-student’s mea culpa. Its dolorous power becomes sheer bitterness in Edge of Darkness.Craven makes the world pay as it has made him pay.

Director Martin Campbell was a shrewd directorial pick. Casino Royale proved that Campbell had an artful taste for violence, plus his work with cinematographer Phil Meheux was splendidly vivid atmosphere.

Starting with the opening, almost fairytale imagery of bodies floating in a sinister, sumptuously lit lake, Campbell and Meheux give poetic treatment to Edge of Darkness’ routine material. Craven’s foil isn’t his distant, naive daughter, nor the duplicitous John Kerrytype senator but a British hit-man played by Ray Winstone, a verse-quoting, world-weary thug, one of the many characters who tower over short, embattled Craven, encouraging his persecution complex.

This is, admittedly, a sympathetic reading of a revenge flick that really isn’t nearly as efficient or as much fun as last year’s Taken. But it would be a mistake to see Edge of Darkness as merely an action flick or even a dubious political thriller like Russell Crowe’s State of Play. Gibson’s artistic endeavors deserve honest appraisal. His middle-aged man’s solitude and moral quest (“Sometimes I feel like Diogenes, you know.Walking around with a lamp, looking for one honest man”) are more compelling than the egotism and false dilemmas of George Clooney offal like Up in the Air or Michael Clayton— which all lack Edge of Darkness’ panache.

Besides, Mel’s intimacy with violence reflects more candor than the critical thugs who beat him up for The Passion of the Christ. (Craven is told: “Fitzgerald said, ‘An artist is one who has two opposing ideas in his head.’”) Those hypocrites condemned Gibson for the kind of violence they ordinarily adore in Miike, Park Chan Wook and other lesser artists.